Frances, thank you SO MUCH for coming forward with this, and for your detailed discussion of how such a prominent organization handled a case like this. I am not sure how many people are unable to write posts like this. I really, really appreciate it.
I am seeing this post a couple months late because I radically stepped back from the EA community in August. As much as this post has shaken me (literally), I am so grateful that it’s here to read and that I got to read it.
On a personal note (which I’ll circle back from), I miss everyone! There was a time last summer that I was bed-bound by a week-long anxiety-driven vasovagal episode that I told everyone was food poisoning. As much as I want to go back to EAGs and Slack channels, my body threatens me with something similar whenever I think about it. (To anyone whose emails I’ve ignored, I’m really sorry!) I even spent almost the entire Vancouver Summit hiding in a locked room, even though I helped host it in a building that’s a second home to me. Like, the keys to that building are on my keychain every day, I have slept in it, I loved so many people at that event… but even there, I couldn’t face anyone who might ask me what I’ve been up to and why it’s not the same as it used to be.
Circling back, I don’t know if you remember me from EAGs, but I remember meeting you “a few Bostons ago” at an afterparty. It’s not just that you’re a ray of sunshine, it’s also that seeing you in a prominent position as a candid young woman gave me hope for what I might be able to do. I hope that energy propagates in the community… but I mostly hope you do really well going forward. Because to me, you’ve been a cornerstone of this community, and I think whichever communities have people like you in them will do good better. So if you have any difficulty engaging with the community in ways that remind you of what happened, I wish you all the healing, and I also know that any other directions you put your energy into instead will blossom.
Just scrolling down the Community page and found this older quick take. I wanted to throw in an “agree from personal experience” comment. I wasn’t targeted, i.e., I found EA organically by looking up related terms when I was 22. But I really wish I found it when I was 5-10 years older! I think I jumped the gun financially on some donations and personally-funded projects in ways that made me overly vulnerable and less effective.
I took on some debt to self-fund some of my philanthropy advising and career exploration, and that made an exit from an EA group house and an exit from an EA organization both much more stressful than they otherwise would have been. I naively ignored how my lack of financial power could affect these relationships because I generalized the community as “high trust.” I accepted surprising things in both situations that were very unfavourable medium-term and long-term, because they were short-term safer financially during a period of several major overlapping stressors.
Even though I have a sense of urgency around effective cause areas and I want to move on them, I am making myself develop a stable financial position before I reengage—at least as stable as the median highly-engaged EA.